3 Tips on How to Keep Your Writing Concise
In a profession where writing can take up most of the day’s work load, PR professionals can employ various strategies to keep their writing tight and active to convey their ideas more aptly.
Here are three tips on how to keep your writing more concise.
- Get rid of expletives. An expletive is an indirect phrase that only delays the writer’s point. Expletives include “There is,” “there are,” “there was,” and “there were,” as well as any of these phrases with it substituting for there. It is not necessary to every expletive you come across, but use them sparingly.
In most cases, eliminating the expletive and beginning with the subject will do, as in revision of “There are other steps a company can take before an economic downturn to protect against its impact” to “A company can take other steps before an economic downturn to protect against its impact.”
- Change adjectives to adverbs. One class of wordy wording often found in business writing is represented by such adjective-noun phrases as “on a daily basis,” which is easily replaced by the adverbial form of the adjective (which in this case is identical: daily).
Regarding similar usage, “This issue will be resolved on a case-by-case basis” is easily converted to “This issue will be resolved case by case.” (Again, the replacement is identical, though the hyphens are now no longer needed.)
- Avoid adjectives all together. Some adjectives and adverbs themselves are extraneous. Such qualifiers as currently and different almost never contribute to better comprehension.
For example, in “We are currently accepting applications,” the verb are clearly represents that acceptance of application is a current state, meaning that currently serves no useful purpose, and “These shirts come in seven different colors” provides no more information than “These shirts come in seven colors,” and different can therefore be omitted without negative consequences